Some often unrecognized parts of his mastery.

Tolkien is recognized far and wide as a master of worldbuilding, of language, and of legend. Some dislike his implementations. Some despise his theology. Some say a lot of things. But, as a rule, Tolkien’s claim to mastery in those areas is known, respected, even generally accepted. Today, I’d like to highlight some of Tolkien’s strengths which lie elsewhere, points that lift The Lord of the Rings, The Children of Hurin, and The Hobbit past being excellent lore-dumps with an attached story.

Timbre

Tolkien’s skill with the timbre of prose is exceptional. He could write the playfulness of The Hobbit, the seriousness-turning-towards-mythic of The Lord of the Rings, the grim-and-mythic of The Children of Hurin, the outright mythological in The Ainulindale. Within those works. More, he could vary the timbre of his prose within those, from the Shire’s down-to-earthness, carried forward in Samwise Gamgee, to the high rush of the coming of salvation to Gondor in The Return of the King. He could present Tom Bombadil, running around in bright colors and making silly rhymes, and in that lord’s house could come dreams of fear running towards the novel’s ‘realism.’

J.R.R. Tolkien, to my mind, is among the finest workers of prose in English literature. He stands with his own peculiar bent, of course, just as does C.S. Lewis, but he stands there nonetheless, capable both of the mythic and of the mundane, of the soaring and the earthy.

(And he turned this among other skills to a surprising capacity for comedy; The Lord of the Rings has sprinkled in it much levity, among which is a skill in juxtaposing language of legends with the language of the mundane and the blunt-spoken, with commonly humorous but never bathetic effect. Then there is the memorable scene of Aragorn all-but-pranking the hobbits in Minas Tirith, speaking with them in full gravity of their lost packs while seeing those packs in plain view behind the hobbits who contemplate their loss.)

Realism

As one not thoroughly versed in medieval history and logistics, I can only say that by all accounts I’ve found, the wars of The Lord of the Rings are exceptionally true to the nature of pre-modern warfare, true in logistics, tactics, and measurements, an achievement exceedingly rare in fiction, fantasy and otherwise. Further, for all some malinger about Aragorn’s tax policy going unmentioned, the bits of ruling and societal arrangement visible in Tolkien’s work have that same realism of matching how medieval societies arrange their governance (fealty, not tax, for instance, and relationship rather than bureaucracy).

Rest

The Lord of the Rings is a lengthy work, few will deny, and that could be tiring, grinding down. A long, wearing journey across the waste could easily produce a grim work, difficult to read by means of relentlessly pulling the reader back into a downwards spiral, fatiguing to read no matter the hope at the end of the tunnel. Such a work has its virtues, but Tolkien chose otherwise. Tolkien chose to employ times of rest and of extreme beauty in his story, calling the characters and the reader alike back to the light.

Yet he does not sacrifice tension or momentum to do so (well, maybe momentum, for some). Time with Bombadil or in Rivendell or in Lothlorien may be a relief from the difficulty and terror of the journey, but they are emphatically waypoints. They are temporary, known from the beginning to be so. They serve both to remind the reader-and-characters of what is risked, what beauty hangs in the balance, and to ask the character again whether he will step forward from this rest into the maelstrom, if he will sacrifice himself and his tranquility for the sake of what he loves. In other words, each departure from rest is in a way another moment to turn towards heroism, impressed on the reader and the characters, preparing both for the escalating tensions of the story.

Tension and Climax

As I discussed in this article, Tolkien has a keen sense for story tension. This skill should not be forgotten in the midst of his worldbuilding prowess. Tolkien knew how to establish stakes, how to call victory into doubt, how to keep ever forefront the question of what price will be paid even if victory is achieved. The rest points, as already mentioned, are part of his skill there. His books may not be thrillers, but if a reader is willing to invest in them, they pull you in, fostering a hunger to continue, to discover whether beauty and goodness and home can ever come to victory against overwhelming odds.

God bless.